Short Reviews of Inexpensive Books

I read a lot of books commuting to and from work on the bus.
This brings up the problem: what to read? Some books I read are, not
surprisingly, from authors I have liked in the past, while others are
books that have been recommended to me by others. These are all great
(although I do try to avoid reading pretentious books in public).

Nevertheless, since variety is the spice of life, I wanted a way to
read books I'd never heard of, picked out at random. My solution was to
go to my local bookstore and buy books off the bargain shelf based
basically off what they look like (ie judging books by their
covers). I really only have one explicit filter: no series (not that
they're bad; I'm just not interested in becoming embroiled in a 15-book
saga). Given that all I have to go on are covers, this filter mostly
boils down to discarding anything that has "Book x of the y
series" or "A somebody novel" on the cover. It works pretty well.
There are implicit filters, too. My predilection leans towards what
I'd call "speculative fiction" (a hoity-toity way of saying "sci-fi"),
but I'm willing to read anything well written.

I suspect there are a number of reasons for a book being on the bargain
shelf, but they all boil down to something like: the bookseller thought
she would sell more copies of the book than she actually did. It's not
specifically a filter for quality, but I have noticed that a certain
fraction of the books seem to be there because they're just a little
odd—not bad or crazy or off-the-wall, just far enough out of
the mainstream to make them look reasonable on paper, but somehow make
buyers skip them for something closer to what they were looking for.

A detective investigates a suicide. The dust jacket on my copy tries
to link this author with Stieg Larsson, which does neither author any
favours. This is not Larsson-esque high-octane action; what it is, is
primarily a meditation on coping with death, and an excellent one at
that. Translation by Victoria Cribb.

Another Culture novel. Both internal and external power struggles
abound in various species up and down the technological ladder. In the
end Special Circumstances shows up to knock some heads. A door-stopper
of enjoyable action sci-fi.

Read along as a man's life gets destroyed through no fault of his
own. (It's like watching a slow-motion train wreck.) A portion of the
story is seen through the eyes of the primary antagonist (who's somewhat
sympathetic) which has the result of lessening the thrill a bit, but not
at the expense of the story. Well paced.

Let's call it a steampunk crime novel. Full of fantastic elements,
including a man who experiences time backwards. It's a very creative
world, and shows promise, but there's too much of it, and the story
suffers from a lack of focus.

A retelling of the fall of Troy from the point of view of a Hittite
mercenary. Not a bad version of the story as far as it goes, but the
Iliad is still better. I would have been more interested with a
book about Hittites, but I guess it would have had to have been called
A Hittite or One of Several Hittites, which aren't as
snappy.

A historical novel set in 1849 revolving around the aftermath of the
Chartists in Britain (and more broadly, the European revolutions of
1848). A very engaging adventure. Almost certainly ended up on the
bargain shelf due to being an epistolary novel, though I thought that
form worked well.

A WWI vet and his wife come into conflict with an unnatural threat to
their new town. (It's on the other side of the river). I don't read
much horror, but found this to be well characterised and well paced.

A mystery set in old-timey London. But this is Edwardian
London (a bona fide motor car makes an appearance). And where Sherlock
Holmes solves crimes with deduction, our American protagonist's primary
advantage seems to be an unflinchingly tenacious inability to just give
up. A concise, well written story.

Such a classic from Christie that even if you haven't read it, you
probably already have heard the basics of the story (but may not realise
it). A delightful enough read, although Miss Marple can come off as
suspiciously omniscient in places.

An elderly garage owner looks to sell his business, coming into
conflict with a car salesman who sublets part of his property.
Originally written in 1960, rejected by his publisher, and only finally
published posthumously in 1986, while not bad per se, sub-par for Dick.
The publisher made the right decision in declining the manuscript.
There's better PKD.

A new cop in town struggles to get his life in order. The town is
full of cemeteries, the cemeteries are full of ghosts, and there are
ghost crimes that need a-solvin'. The strength of this book is the
relationships between the (non-ghost) characters, and the ghost malarkey
simply serves as distraction. Would have been better without them.

Charles Dickens comes to America and has a bad time of it.
Meanwhile, Edgar Allen Poe fakes his own death. Thrills ensue.
Includes a delightfully egregious misinterpretation of David
Copperfield by Poe but on the whole would have benefited from some
tightening of the narrative.

As the title says, a student assistant in a physics lab accidentally
creates a time machine. A time machine to adventure! Has a fairly
realistic feel to the beginning physics lab part, and the adventure is
well paced. Gets a little surreal near the end, but a very enjoyable
read.

Hard-boiled detective fiction in space (or, at least, on a dystopic
human colony planet in the far future). Futuristic elements don't seem
to add a whole lot to the plot, so the whole thing might have been
better dropping the "in space" part, and put it in boring-old now, at
which point we'd be left with perfectly serviceable noir.

The life and times of an artist. Funny and extremely well done.
Houellebecq inserts himself into the novel. At first it seems like it's
to poke fun at himself, but the character's involvement in the plot
takes a frankly bizarre turn at the start of Part Three. Worth the
read. Translation by Gavin Bowd.

A history of the development of civilian strong cryptography and the
US government's (ongoing) bungling attempts to suppress the research.
All your favourite players are there. A good introduction for those who
know little of the subject; well researched. Levy provides a cohesive
picture of the conflict.

A man starts getting phone calls from his dead father. Weirdness
ensues. Unfortunately, this is one of those slightly-too-odd books
on the bargain shelf. Mosley is an excellent writer, and this isn't
bad, but the story stays a bit too long in the uncomfortable grey
region between realistic and fantastic.

An agent from the future comes to modern-day D.C. to thwart the bad
guys ("historical agitators", or "hags") and make sure history stays on
track. At least that's what he thinks he's doing. More espionage
thriller than time travel sci-fi, and, as that, it makes for a
reasonably good read.

Proof that even Pulitzer Prize winners end up on the bargain shelf.
An exploration on the origins of human intelligence. Written in 1977,
it's not surprising that parts are now dated. Despite that, still a
good introduction to the field.

A collection of short stories exploring human foibles and the human
condition. I very much enjoyed the first story, "Victory Lap", and the
last "Tenth of December". The remainder vary, but they're short, and
none of them are bad. Very well written, there's probably something
in here for everyone.

An unexpected mixture of telepathy, Huntington's disease and Nazi
hunters. For much of the book the telepathy part seemed like an
unnecessarily glaring plot convenience, but Sawyer wraps things up well
in the end, so no problem there.

A lurking horror stalks the crews of the Erebus and
Terror in a fictionalised account of Franklin's lost expedition.
Simmons, never one to go easy on his readers, provides a reletlessly
oppressive yet engaging story. The setting itself provides much of the
terror, and we all know how the expedition went, but Simmons manages to
keep things from being unrelentingly bleak. Excellent.

During the Cold War, the US struggles to colonise another planet and
deal with its primitive aborigines. Oddly enough, the aborigines are
human. And the planet is Venus. Also, there are dinosaurs. Another
from the just-too-odd shelf. Presumably Stirling wanted to publish this
story sixty years ago, when it would have fit in better, but didn't
start soon enough. Bizarre.

The Tower of London and the London Undergound Lost Property Office
provide the backdrop for a story of love, loss, and loneliness among a
troop of eccentrics. Alternately bizarre, hilarious, heartwarming,
charming, and sentimental, to resonably good effect. Unclear how the
tortoise, who provides little more than a cameo, finagled third
billing.

That classic, proto-sci-fi, 18th-century satire. It's
worth a read, but the problem with satire is it doesn't work very well
if you're unfamiliar with the thing being satired. The text was fine,
but in place of the rather arbitrary miniature dictionary at the end of
the Collins Classics edition I read, I would have preferred some
explanatory notes on the text.

An out-of-work journalist has a week to find some money to avoid
losing his house. Starts off well, and funny in places, but I found the
protagonist's chronic poor decision making and self-pity left me
apathetic to his story.

Somehow this one made it past my book series filter. Nevertheless,
set in an alternate 1949 where Britain didn't join World War II.
Result: fascist Britain. The protagonist spends a fair bit of his time
trying to save Hitler from an assassin. Walton avoids descending into
polemics and delivers a good (if depressing) read.

Space aliens invade earth next Thursday. They have the high ground
but have neglected their pre-invasion homework. Weber does one thing
well: tactical military fiction. He does that very well, and
there's plenty of it here. Marred by an utterly ridiculous deus ex
machina at the end.